Science Library Pad

the Web 2.0 tag

The dilemma of folksonomy (as seen by Technorati tags)

web20 - 15 posts
web2.0 - 204 posts
web 2.0 (a space between) - 484 posts

I guess we have a winner.

TagCloud

I find TagCloud interesting mainly because it is a service built on a service.
It uses Yahoo's Content Summarization service (Yahoo Developer: Term Extraction Documentation) to scan your postings in an RSS feed, and then takes the extracted concept words and makes them into a "cloud" view.

It's like the folksonomy views generated from user-created tags, except it is automatic.

Personally, I think the categories I put in myself are more relevant than the ones Yahoo discovered.
OMG, am I turning into a librarian? :)

Anyway, you can judge the results for yourself below.

cloud from http://www.tagcloud.com/cloud/html/SciLib/default/50

Service discovered via CIE Thoughts: TagClouds help to show what we're talking about?

UPDATE: Previously
2005-March-31 Yahoo Term Extraction Service Available

Yahoo MyWeb tags

You can see all the tags in one of those visual folksonomy displays at

http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myweb?dg=6&dmode=vtags

If you want to search for a particular tag, use

http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myweb?ei=UTF-8&dg=6&tag=TAG e.g.

http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myweb?ei=UTF-8&dg=6&tag=folksonomy

via Library Stuff

delicious bookmarks get even more tasty

In case you haven't been playing with del.icio.us in a while, you might want to go and check it out again.
It has added automatic suggested expansion of tags, so instead of me having to type Service-Oriented_Architecture I just type "ser" and then the suggestion is correct so I hit TAB to have it filled in (it took me a while to figure out to hit tab).

You can also see my bookmarks with a sort of tag cloud.

You can also see the most popular postings for tags, if there are enough bookmarks with that tag.  For example http://del.icio.us/popular/folksonomy

UPDATE: Via Macintouch today, I found that Ruben R. Puentedura has done a presentation A Moveable Feast: the del.icio.us web.  It is available as PDF, and as MP3 audio.  As well, he did a report on how to generate maps of del.icio.us using some MacOS X tools.

I suppose while I'm in the folksonomy space, I should mention Gataga, a federated search for bookmark tagging systems.

Technorati beta tag interface

I found that Technorati has a new (to me anyway) beta.technorati.com,
which includes a new tag interface you can check out, e.g.

http://beta.technorati.com/tag/sla2005

building blogdigger groups?

Does anyone know how to build blogdigger groups that include searches?

I made a group SLA2005-moderated to try to capture blogs beyond just the main SLA conference blog.
I wanted to try to filter or incorporate tagged postings, but there are two problems:
1) BlogDigger only sees true, RSS-level categories.  So if it's e.g. a Blogger blog using Technorati pseudotagging, you can't do a subject search.
2) You can't build BlogDigger groups from other BD searches (at least, it wouldn't work for me)

I tried to add the RSS feed
http://www.blogdigger.com/rss.jsp?q=subject%3Asla2005&sortby=date

but BD just ignored the addition.

If anyone wants the moderator password, just email me.  I just passworded to protect against random additions.  You're welcome to create an SLA2005-unmoderated as well.

So far I just added the two division blogs: PAM and News Division.

The more I try searching or grouping based on tags, the more I find things that don't work,
or search engines that are indexing way too slow and way too little.

slow technorati indexing considered harmful

The theory behind the Technorati taggregation is great: see all posts with a tag on one page, aggregated from the blogosphere, Flickr, Furl and delicious.

The reality is that it is subject to the whims of Technorati indexing, which means that if Technorati indexes your site a lot, you end up looking like a taghog, while if Technorati doesn't pick up your site, it looks like you're excluded.

For example right now Technorati tag sla2005 shows loads of my posts, but none of the good new posts from the SLA PAM Division blog.  There are similar problems with BlogDigger, which does not appear to have the DPAM blog in its index.

I guess this is one of the risks you're always stuck with when relying on third-party tools outside of your control.

In theory, if you ping Technorati, it's supposed to pick up your new postings in its next indexing sweep.

Until there's some more reliable way of getting tagged postings indexed quickly and reliably, I can see there's going to be a bit of taggravation.

bye bye WebOPAC

We are talking very seriously at the University of Winnipeg about ditching our WebOPAC in favour of our own RedLightGreen-style search interface. We will be dumping all our MARC records out to XML and building our own interface: at least I hope so. ...

The key for us will be the ability to query and write to the Oracle DB underlying our Innopac system. This should give us the opportunity to develop components in OLAF iteratively, maintaining those staff functions that we can't easily build a system for. We already have a number of open source components installed/built and in operation (MyCybrary, ILL, Offline Circulation, Spine Labels, E Resource Management, Linking, Repository), so there are not too many left.

Link: Loomware - Crafting New Libraries: Folksonomies Help Information Organization.

And how will the new system be organized?

I am convinced that folksonomy is the way to go with our library catalogues.

I am completely in agreement with this approach; I will be watching its success closely.

technology and your library

There was some buzz in the library blog space about "why tech".  Why do I need this new tech?  How am I supposed to keep up with all the changes, all the blogging, all the new everything.

My answer is: maybe you don't.  You don't serve technology, tech serves you.

Remember that we are all writing from different perspectives.  CISTI is a C$50 million a year organization, with multi-million revenue (cost-recovery) streams through both docdel and publishing.  We're 30 minutes outside the downtown core and, based on my observations, these days we get almost no foot traffic from researchers.  We also have "embedded" librarians throughout NRC institutes.  Either we provide information to our librarians and researchers remotely, and preferably electronically, or we perhaps cease to exist.

This, as you might imagine, gives us a strong impetus to leverage technology.

Michael Stevens has a great presentation out that he gave at NEASIST: Optimizing Technology in Libraries.  The optimal set of technologies for the types of information you provide to your users is, or should be, unique to your set of requirements and capabilities.

He puts it clearly:

“Technology is a tool…
it is only a tool”
Sandra Nelson
Wired for the Future

I'm planning to talk more soon about, well, technology planning, in the meantime, here are some starting points from recent postings I have noticed:

Catalogablog talks about his vision for his library.
The recent UCISA 2005 conference "21st Century Thinking" presentations are packed with information to delight the technophiles and further enfear the technophobes.
For visual thinkers, Scott Wilson does some beautiful diagrams.  Here's a recent one on his vision of the future Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).
Is folksonomy an annoying buzzword, or does it describe a useful capability?  schwagbag lays it on the line with Ordering Reality Through Classification: Making the Case for Tags and Folksonomies.
LibraryClips talks about quite an elaborate methodology for Categories vs. tags.
Personally I use tags to make it easier for me to locate and group together information in the vast sea of stuff I blog and bookmark.  As an added benefit, it makes it much easier for people to subscribe to or discover just the categories of my information that they are interested in.
'What are books anyway?  Surely... a technological revolution in information dissemination.  Some people weren't so keen on this new technology.  Kind of like that "Internet" I've been hearing so much about (is that thing still around?).  Why is this important?  Read the conclusion of Library Boy's report about the opening of the new  Grande Bibliothèque in Quebec:

"The poor showing [in books borrowed from libraries] is often called a legacy of the ... Church; according to popular lore, when advocates obtained a $150,000 grant from the Andrew Carnegie Foundation for a new Montreal library in the early 1900s, church authorities forced them to refuse it".

Conference blogging is another technology-enabled way to share information.  Carol Cooke provides her thoughts from  Manitoba Libraries Conference 2005 Day 1.
Blogging is great, but what about these darn wiki things?  LibraryClips talks about going from blog to wiki:

Transferring the essential information from a blog or message board and archiving it in a presentable format like a wiki (the information in the wiki can link back to the original blog posts).

I wish I did this, instead I keep all the information I like in a social bookmark manager like Furl. This is good to store and share information, but it lacks the clarity in presentation of a wiki or a simple web-page. The natural third step is place items of great importance or use in a wiki format or your own webpage.

This is simple but great insight, a company may be working on a particular project; gathering all relevant information for this project from the blogs of the company and archive them in a wiki, listing them in one list/s you can scroll down.
It’s not neccessarily long term, the wiki may be just set up to serve the purpose of a project, once finished the wiki is there for retrospective purposes.

So there you have it, a ton of technology being pondered, just in a few days' worth of blog postings.  Here's the key: pick what's useful for you.

in which everyone finally starts to get wikis

So I went to Internet Librarian 2004.  And I was like, where's the organized blogging?  Where's the consensus conference tag?  Where's the wiki?  This is what happens when you send an Internet and Computer Science geek to a library conference.

So I made my own:
Technorati IL2004
My blogging of IL2004
My Kinja thing (which will now be filled with hopelessly non-IL2004 posts) http://kinja.com/user/netlib2004/
A wiki il2004.xwiki.com

Anyway, the good news is that now apparently everyone is all oh I get it.

My Furl is overflowing with Wiki-licious info from today and the recent past.

I have also decided to address this library conference consensus tag issue by making a wiki page.
UPDATE 2005-05-03: First I had to decide where to host the wiki.

Here's what I tried before I decided on SeedWiki:
* XWiki is quite confusing to set permissions for.
* JotSpot is just as bad.  Permissions can only get more restrictive for child pages.  Additionally, it's not clear how it deals with edit collisions.  If I access a page as "guest" and then exit, when I got in again it tells me guest has a lock on the page, and asks if I want to break the lock.  If you've got a lot of unregistered people editing the page at once, it looks like a recipe for disaster.  I am trying to get clarification from JotSpot.  Also, JotSpot doesn't seem to support a page discussion area.
* SeedWiki is quite powerful and has simple permissions management.  I can lock the master page while leaving other pages open.  It is happy to let multiple edits run simultaneously, however, they will overwrite.  That is, if we both have the page open for editing, and first user1 saves then user2 saves, the history will retain user1's changes, but they will be completely replaced in the display by user2's changes.

It's a difficult call.  JotSpot chooses to be pessimistic, and lock the page (with anyone able to break the lock), SeedWiki chooses to be optimistic and leave the page open for editing.

Note: if I'm wrong in any of this analysis, please feel free to comment.

Here's a wiki just for library conference tags.  Going to a conference?  Post the tag.  Disagree?  Discuss.
Anyway, we'll see how the SeedWiki approach goes:

http://www.seedwiki.com/wiki/scilib/libraryconferencetag.cfm

It's wide open for editing.  Hopefully there won't be too many edit collisions.
As a bonus, for those of you who can't get enough of folksonomy, SeedWiki supports tagging of pages by registered users.

Here are more library conference wikis:
ALA 2005 Conference Wiki
CLA 2005 Conference Wiki

And blogging about conference wikis:
Library Stuff - Wikis and Blogs at ALA Annual
The Distant Librarian - CLA Calgary Wiki
The Ten Thousand Year Blog - More library wikis put on a human face

In case you're wondering, scilib.jot.com is not me, it's by Binghamton University, who also have a Science Library Blog.  The JotSpot I set up is libwiki.jot.com but it's not currently open for editing.

terminology watch: environmental scan

I'm going to be writing a bit soon about the process of keeping yourself up-to-date on technology trends.

I have seen lots of terminology in this area, so I'm wondering what the opinion is on the best term(s) for this, so that I can create a meaningful category/tag.

Currently in Furl I'm using "Technology Foresight".

Other possibilities are:
- environmental scan
- horizon scan (have only seen this used in the UK)
- technology watch
- trend watch

Which one is most meaningful to you?  I'm reluctant to use "environmental scan" or "horizon scan" because they are not self-explanatory; if you don't already know what they mean, you will just be guessing, and might even think they have something to do with environmentalism or sightseeing.

UPDATE 2005-05-11: I shall ask the Google Oracle

"technology foresight" = about 58,000
"environmental scan" = about 91,500
"horizon scan" = about 759
"technology watch" = about 54,000
"tech watch" = about 148,000

"trend watch" = about 54,800

Conclusion: based on what I see, "environmental scan" is widely used and understood, but it covers a much broader area than just technology.  Between "technology foresight" and "technology watch", it's still a toss-up.  "Foresight" seems to be a bit more common usage internationally.

boring site news: more tag alignment

I have changed my TypePad category "Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)" to be just "Service-Oriented Architecture".
On delicious I have changed tag SOA to be Service-Oriented_Architecture.

Just cleaning up my personal folksonomy.

reconciling TypePad and delicious

My TypePad categories (tags) have spaces, my delicious ones do not (because spaces don't work in delicious). Apparently the way to resolve this is to make tags in delicious with underscores instead of spaces. Technorati tags considers TypePad "Enterprise Architecture" and delicious Enterprise_Architecture to be the same tag. I am going to go through and change all my delicious tags to match my TypePad tags.

Bruce Sterling on folksonomy in Wired

Wired Magazine April 2005: Order Out of Chaos

There's a revolution going on in the art and science of categorization, and its name is folksonomy, a term term invented by information architect Thomas Vander Wal.
...
A folksonomy... arises spontaneously as Net users encounter information, think about what it means, and tag it with descriptive words. Then software makes the information accessible via a simple keyword search. The results aren't definitive or scientific, but they can be very useful.

Etech 2005 - more tech news than you can flickr a wiki at

The 2005 O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference is underway with zillions of tech titans making announcements about all sorts of things.

You can attempt to surf the flood starting at

Conference Coverage
continuing on through their
Etech 2005 Wiki

Did you see the Plasma [screen] in the mezzanine? It's an Attention Stream. Want to see your stuff there? Post it to Flickr, ping Technorati, del.icio.us it, and tag it: etech05 or etech. There is also a live archive available, which in my opinion is a great way to see what happened at any point in time, without the need to search different source to get the whole picture.

That's right, to link it again, it's a conference with its own Attention Stream powered by tagging and other tech.

Anyway there are so many bazillions of things that I can't possibly indicate them all.
Here are a few that struck my fancy:

A9 has come up with this "let's put it in RSS" search extension idea: opensearch.a9.com

Many sites today return search results as a tightly integrated part of the website itself. Unfortunately, those search results can't be easily reused or made available elsewhere, as they are usually wrapped in HTML and don't follow any one convention. OpenSearch offers an alternative: an open format that will enable those search results to be displayed anywhere, anytime. Rather than introduce yet another proprietary or closed protocol, OpenSearch is a straightforward and backward-compatible extension of RSS 2.0, the widely adopted XML-based format for content syndication.

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing sez Here are my notes from "Folksonomy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess," a conversation between Clay Shirky, Stewart "Flickr" Butterfield, Joshua "Delicious" Schachter and Jimmy "Wikipedia" Wales at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego: etech2005-folksonomy.txt

A new word: spag = tag spam.

newspaper blogging, including readers

We were just settling down on our laurels to have a rest and a cup of tea, and to congratule ourselves on having done something rather new and exciting with the Observer blog, when our attention is brought to exciting developments in France. (Thank you Neville Hobson.)

It turns out that Le Monde, once the stuffiest newspaper in the world by a comfortable margin, has reader blogs. Ordinary punters, as long as they are subscribers to Le Monde online, can lash their blogs to the newspaper's masthead. Meanwhile, a handful of journalists on Libération, a much less stuffy French newspaper, now have their own blogs.

from The Observer blog (part of Guardian Unlimited)

As a side note, it appears the Observer bloggers tag their posts.  A visual folksonomy of recent postings is provided.

As a side side note, I find it amusing that Le Monde is quite happy to use the word "blog".  In Quebec French I think you're supposed to use "cybercarnet".

Stewart Butterfield on Flickr

Koman: About the tagging, Flickr and del.icio.us are usually mentioned in the same breath of having pioneered this concept of "folksonomies." Adam Mathes calls this a shift in who creates the metadata from the author to the user. Lots of del.icio.us and Flickr users describe an object--a web page or a photo--in the way that makes sense to them, with no interest in how the author might have classified the page.

Information experts like Lou Rosenfeld complain that folksonomy tags, while interesting, don't support searching or browsing particularly well, don't support relationships, don't offer true classification, and can't even cluster synonyms. So why does this uncontrolled mass-tagging by users makes sense?

Butterfield: First, going back to the del.icio.us comparison for a second, we were definitely directly inspired by del.icio.us. There's an interesting difference, though: because people are adding URLs to del.icio.us, and many people can add the same URL, you end up with multiple ways of tagging the same thing--different people's vocabulary for the same item. On the other hand, each photo a user uploads to Flickr is unique and belongs to them; however, more than one person can tag it. (For people who have large personal networks in Flickr, they definitely find that they upload a photo and go to sleep, and in the morning there are tags all over it.)

The complaint that it's uncontrolled and it's not going to be captured in a consistent way to me is really irrelevant. Because tags are first and foremost for people to organize their own photos--and if they weren't, it wouldn't work. It's a happy accident that the whole global collection emerges.

...

Now there are some things that will annoy people, like singular versus plural forms, homonyms and homographs, and alternative spellings. But a lot of this is easy to deal with when you have enough data. In general, disambiguation is a harder problem.

We've done step one of relatedness of tags, which is just cluster analysis of how people tag, and then we suggest related tags. So if you tag "Italy," it will suggest "Rome," "architecture," "travel," "food," "Europe," etc. And it works astoundingly well. People usually think there's a human editor, but it's just cluster analysis. And there is a lot more of that coming--some of which we're hoping to show at the 2005 [ETech] conference.

Koman: Do you see Flickr and its open API as representing a next generation of web services? What things can developers learn from what has happened with Flickr?

Butterfield: On the strictly practical side, I think we had one person inquire about using the SOAP version of the API. I don't know if any apps were actually built. There is at least one application built on XML-RPC. But all the others--I don't even know how many there are--are built on the REST API. It's just so easy to develop that way; I think it's foolish to do anything else.

from Stewart Butterfield on Flickr on the O'Reilly Network
Koman is Richard Koman, you can read his blog.

ways to improve library interfaces

The Shifted Librarian introduces

MLS February Tech Summit on Social Bookmark Services

with a lot of interesting thoughts about how library interfaces / OPACs could be improved by incorporating ideas from the net, like "what's related" as well as user tagging (folksonomies).

Side note: my blog has now reached 2001 hits.  It was 999 hits on December 28, 2004.